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Catching Our Breath
I knew a boy who once wished out loud that his mama would die. “I’m tired of waiting for it,” Tommy Muller said. He tossed a baseball up into the sky and watched for it, blinding himself with sunlight, as if the ball returning to his mitt was the thing most worth his attention. He and his sister Nadine, my new best friend, stood in my front yard as Mom passed us on her way back from the mailbox. At dinner that night she pointed her empty fork at me, scolding me as if I was the one responsible. “That boy’s lost his sense of decent conversation.” The drain of that summer still swirls and threatens to swallow me up whenever I think of Tommy, his brothers and sisters and their house next door, with me poised at the edge of our two yards, aching to be part of their large family and scared as hell that they might invite me into it. At fourteen, I hovered the farthest orbits of adult circles, skimmed the neighbors’ low level, murmured conversations. I decoded the overheard word: cancer, a disease of dread and no way out. Speak it too loud and you might catch it. Tommy was sixteen, the oldest of seven children, all of them to be left motherless when Mrs. Muller gave in to cancer that August. I was in awe of the Muller children, how the adults discussed them in hushed voices behind their hands, wondering, “What will he do with all those kids?” The children’s fate sounded disposable, as if they could be easily dispatched like a litter of kittens, a basket left to chance by a roadside fence. “There but for the grace of God…” someone was bound to say. Was that supposed to make us feel better? A tornado had paused over our neighborhood and had blown a freight train of wind through Muller’s house. While the outer frame stood in one piece, all the hearts inside were learning how they could break but still show no damage. The Mullers had barely moved into the neighborhood that spring when their mom first took sick and had to rest afternoons in her room. By four o’clock on weekdays the house burst with the noise we’d contained all school day long. Our commotion chewed at her nerves, their dad, Hal, said. He turned every one of the kids, his own and me, outside. “Get some fresh air,” he’d yell, as if being indoors and breathing in what their mom exhaled might burrow in us, too, and swell. So we took our games into the Muller front yard, where the grass got tore up from us playing “pickle.” In this Nadine and I didn’t have to compete against the boys’ strength. The simple game of base running depended on our swiftness and on beating the throw. Grooves around the two bases swelled deep on the few rainy days, and threw up dust clouds the further we drifted into summer. Their lawn became the neighborhood’s biggest eyesore despite the fact that Hal Muller owned a sod business. Could you make a living selling squares of grass, I wondered? It seemed too common a commodity to make a career of. If Hal pulled his red truck into the driveway, with the rolled green blankets still piled high in the bed, he’d had a bad day. Hal nursed a bad heart and a worse temper. You never knew which would explode. You learned to steer clear. The Mullers lived in a blond brick house with peeling pink trim they didn’t bother scraping or repainting. They had other priorities. The driveway blacktop buckled where grass had heaved it up. Hal let his red truck rollick right over it. A rusty basketball hoop had been nailed over the garage door. No net, and the metal was bent from Tommy’s pulling and dunking. House and property upkeep slid downhill at the Muller’s, but they could claim their mom’s cancer as their excuse. By June she’d started giving herself away to it. “They have enough to tend,” neighbors said. Tommy helped Hal with the sod that summer. He’d ride home in the passenger seat of the red truck each evening, elbow out the window in a triangle, tan, then tanner, then his skin as dark as his mom’s appeared in a black and white photo that had been artificially aged to an old-fashioned brown. I’d stolen a peek at it in the off-limits sick room. “He’s a gorgeous hunk,” I told Nadine. We sat on the crumbling ledges of the front porch, rocking our legs back and forth with the motion of nothing to do. We’d just shaved them for the first time and the bloody crust on our ankles tattled our inexperience with Hal’s razor. I never knew Mrs. Muller when she wasn’t sick, but I saw that picture in her and Hal’s bedroom, the holy spot where we weren’t supposed to be. The day Nadine showed it to me her mom was out getting chemo. I couldn’t fathom it. Mrs. Muller was a dark-skinned woman, the kind you see in ads for suntan lotion. In the picture she wore her hair short and curled around her face. Tommy had her straight, fine looking nose. From Hal he’d inherited the blackest hair and eyes. And he had something – a line, a frown –that drew his eyebrows together, made me think of lightning streaks. He was jittery, wired, couldn’t keep his feet still, always tapping something, or egging us on in his teasing, older boy voice even as we trespassed in their parents’ bedroom. When we heard slamming car doors we ran out the back before Hal could catch us, to where brambles had taken over the backyard. We huddled under the scratchy mess – me, Nadine, and Tommy – catching our breath, thoroughly hidden from the house. We were grateful for distractions, any little trouble that didn’t involve parents. There Nadine kissed her own big brother. Then my turn came. I thought, A boy’s tongue is like a loose minnow. I coasted on waves, taken over by seasickness that made me wobbly. We couldn’t keep this up for long and still look at each other without laughing. Above us a bird had built its nest; eggs had hatched in the mess of brambles, a tender development, I thought. Since we were there, Tommy said the mother wouldn’t venture in and the babies would starve so we’d better feed them. Nadine and I dug up worms, then dropped the squirmy gifts on the ground by Tommy’s feet. He pinched the fattest one between his thumb and his forefinger, wiggling it in front of my nose, but I didn’t budge. We weren’t talking and still he said, “Shhh.” He put the worm in the nest. The babies lifted up their heads, snapping beaks the filmy yellow of old folks’ fingernails, begging silent because they had no voices yet, I guessed. The worm tangled around their necks. “You’re killing them,” I said. Tommy shrugged. “You guys dug them up.” I looked to Nadine but she made her face go blank. Tommy narrowed his eyes. “Either the birds or the worms are going to get it.” His lips were red and puffy from kissing. Hal’s lay-down-the-law voice choked out of his throat. “She shouldn’t have gone off and left them.” Then his sharp laugh fractured the air. Tommy hammered out a drumbeat on a discarded brown beer bottle, spinning it in the dust, overlooking Nadine and making it point at me. “Bet you won’t,” he said. Inside the house Mrs. Muller was dying. Were we callous to experiment while she struggled to breathe? If our hearts were fast-beating and healthy could that be a crime? We didn’t mean for our kissing to edge into first place over death, but it was fine to know something other than sadness for awhile. It was simple boredom that summer, not disrespect. After we found out she’d died while we were back there playing, we handed each other the excuse that we couldn’t have known, as if knowing was all it took to make things work out differently.
I was jealous of their status, those Muller children in their sleek black funeral cars, the purple flags that whipped furiously from the radio antennas. It was almost enough to make me wish for a death in my own family. Mom, with her forearm against my flushed cheek, said, “This heat can make you sick.” I spent hours in front of the window fan. Behind the giant whirring I could still hear the Muller kids playing pickle in their front yard, their laughter not decent for children who had recently buried their mom. I would do their mourning for them. I walked around the house, imagining myself in their place. “Can’t you find something to do?” Mom said, worried, maybe looking ahead to all the bad things waiting for me down the road. I flopped on the couch in the discontented pose I’d been perfecting all summer. From the street came a scream, giggling, the commotion of brothers and sisters hard at work forgetting. I knew how they played the game, and from noise and memory I could envision Tommy as he manned one base while his brother, Jarod, held down the other, but pitifully. Jarod’s sisters ran him ragged and Tommy didn’t help by throwing the ball off base most of the time, sending him in the bushes to find it. Meanwhile the others raced to see how many backs-and-forths they could rack up before he returned. Sometimes Tommy exploded in a fit of laughter. The next minute he might rattle off a string of cuss words. The slap of his basketball against the backboard punctuated the sentences my heart was pounding out. I wanted to fling myself from the house, to fly across the yard to Mullers’, but it wasn’t my place, Mom said, to intrude on their grief. Their playing didn’t sound like sadness to me. I felt abandoned and then ashamed because the Mullers were the only ones who could claim the right to that bucket-in-a-well hollowness. They continued their noisy games, never caving in to the decorum expected of orphan children. But of course they weren’t orphans.
It was Labor Day weekend on Muller’s front porch. Hal had just married Shirl and they were celebrating in the subdued manner of the still newly widowed but now newlywed. With a steak knife Hal cut up watermelon on the picnic table in the kitchen where they would eat, as a family, every night. Shirl didn’t bother bumping her white dress against the kitchen door to open it with her hip. Instead she sat next to Hal and lifted the window screen, admitting all kinds of night bugs so she could hand each piece out to us on the front porch. The mosquitoes sucked the stickiness off our skin. Nadine and I stood there, cement crumbling underneath our gym shoes, when Tommy slammed out the bowed screen kitchen door. “Don’t you take that knife outside,” Hal yelled after him. Rust from the door’s spring had slashed Tommy’s tee shirt dirty red in places, where you might have thought the knife had already done some damage. He pivoted and punched back in the door, slicing the screen. Nadine and I watched as he held the knife right at Hal’s throat in a pose that looked like he was about to shave his dad’s whiskers. Nadine gasped. Then Tommy opened his fist and the knife sounded mild and tinny as it tumbled and spun on the linoleum. He shoved the screen door open with his knee and came back out to us with two hunks of watermelon. My fingers pushed through the stuff when I took it from him with a too-tight grip that I only wanted to latch around his wrist. “Stop acting so scary,” I thought of saying, but when Tommy reached over my shoulder with the salt shaker I backed up against his chest into the smell of dust from ball playing and his sweat. So I said, “Salt on fruit?” then shoved watermelon into my mouth to stop other stupid things from escaping. I wanted to let Tommy lean on me now that his mom was gone, to bolster his broken heart like a gardener splints her weak-stemmed plants. I bet I could have asked him to lay down a knife and he would. Tommy pointed at the watermelon juice dripping down my chin and laughed, then he licked my face.
Shirl kept her breathing machine on the dresser right next to the first Mrs. Muller’s picture. Shirl was a smoker and paid the price for it. Suddenly she’d put down the iron and say, “You kids watch out for this hot iron now,” then take up in the bedroom with this contraption that blew pure oxygen down her throat. We sat in the TV room watching the Flintstones and listening to the machine inhale and exhale for Nadine’s step-mom. Hal had married her right away. “Not even a decent grieving period,” I heard Mom complain to our neighbor on the other side. When we returned to school in the fall Tommy wasn’t with us. Nadine said he’d been sent away for a rest. I thought of him keyed up, at Hal’s throat, of strangling and stabbing and pushing people over the edge of what they wanted to do anyway. Somewhere in my mind I’d almost convinced myself the cancer had caught up with Tommy, too, but Shirl shushed my fears. “He’ll come out of this okay. Summer just wasn’t enough vacation for Tommy,” she said. She pressed hard with the iron into one of Nadine’s seersucker dresses, repository of a thousand wrinkles. While Tommy was away, the Mullers redid the living and dining rooms. They tacked down olive green carpet, plastered and painted over the spot where Tommy had kicked the wall. Shirl sewed ivory damask drapes and sheers to stand beside the windowpanes. She polished up the old furniture until it looked presentable. Hal even sprung for a new couch, which no one was allowed to sit on. He screwed little hooks on the doorways and Shirl bought tasseled tiebacks like she had for the drapes. They used these extras to rope off the good rooms. I worried Tommy’d return to a house he wouldn’t recognize. We were relegated to the TV room or the office they’d converted into a room for Tommy to use when he got back. There was a telephone in there, but when I lifted the heavy black receiver Nadine put her hand on my wrist and said it was strictly for Hal’s sod business. If I needed to call home I had to phone from the kitchen. In their kitchen Hal sat at the picnic table, his large hands, all knuckles and scars, loose around a tumbler of ice and probably whiskey. The air machine was working on Shirl’s lungs in the bedroom. I’d heard the whirring like an air conditioner’s through the window screen when I first approached the porch. They didn’t mind having me around. It was just one extra body among so many slamming in and out the doors and taking up time in the bathroom. I didn’t eat much; I was fourteen and working on skinny. Hal waved me back out of the kitchen with a motion that I should use the phone in the office. I paused between the two rooms, and then thought, the hell with it. In the office Tommy lay stretched out on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. I felt cheated for him because there’d been no fanfare, no slamming of car doors, no welcome back home. And I was a little mystified as to how he’d snuck into the office while I’d been doing my polite routine in the kitchen with Hal. Even more unusual, my entrance didn’t break his concentration on whatever he saw up there in the stucco. Tommy wore a pair of white boxers with a red stripe down the outside of each thigh, and nothing else. I thought he’d jump up any second and run the six-minute mile. The white shorts made his tan appear dark even though we were well into October. I cleared my throat but he still didn’t look my way. I dreaded a return to Hal, remembering his heart, his temper, the Jack Daniels on his breath. I decided to hunt Nadine down from where she’d run off for a movie magazine, but first I grabbed that annoying phrase out of my head kids had been teasing me with from the time they first learned my name and offered it to Tommy. “Penny for your thoughts.” He smiled at the ceiling. “You’re just in time. I’m fresh out of pocket change.” Tommy wasn’t fragile looking or the kind of invalid the mind conjures when you think of the emotionally distraught. He’d worked with the sod all throughout the summer, doing the deliveries, the up and down out of the truck, the backbreaking part. Nadine said it kept him busy at a time when he needed physical work to cancel out thinking. Veins ran atop his forearm muscles and down over the backs of his hands. I clasped my fingers to keep from reaching out and discovering how they would jump back and forth over his bones if only he’d touch me like I wanted him to. I kept up the silly conversation we’d started. “Do you need a loan ‘til payday? I got some money.” He smiled at me, sat up, and thumped the mattress with his hand. “Aren’t you the generous one?” I sat where he’d made a place for me. “Hal says all a man needs is a little faith.” He sighed, as if that might just be the hardest of all things to come by. I inched as close to him as I dared without rattling the bedsprings. Tommy showed me his fever-bright eyes. “Here you are, a Penny for my thoughts.” I forgot about knives, but there was no hiding out from the lightning in his face, from the wounded look that couldn’t be traced to weapons or fists or fingernails. I wished he would kiss me and I closed my eyes so he’d know it. Everything I supposed about him was true. His bones buckled under his skin when he reached for me. The tragic and comic sides of his face blended and for a split second he was so beautiful he was ugly. Thoughts of minnows came back to me, their silver flash in the water, then vanishing. And storms, electricity, Tommy’s fidgeting. If he was trying to tie himself to earth, I would be his accomplice. He whispered where my hair was tucked right behind my ear. “Sometimes I can’t seem to catch my breath, you know?” I nodded. Tommy needed something to trust in and I’d been practicing to be his One and Only for so long that giving in was as easy as breathing. I exhaled into his face and he sucked in a huge sigh. We may as well have been leaping off a cliff. We groped and gulped and swallowed the air, growing more lightheaded with every kiss. Things flip-flopped so I thought about breathing water and drinking air. My mind itched to settle on something rare and familiar, some go-ahead sign, until from the rear of the house I heard Shirl’s oxygen tank hum and the motor kick in.
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